Posts tagged : "Architecture"

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Why the Iranian government neglects the nation’s cultural heritage

Why the Iranian government neglects the nation’s cultural heritage

Persepolis Kourosh Ziabari - Stimson Center: Modern-day Iran is the inheritor of a hallowed civilization and ancient monuments that have survived millennia of invasions, natural disasters, and political upheaval. While Iran’s current diplomatic and economic isolation discourages foreign tourism, the country’s cultural heritage remains one of the nation’s key distinctions, cherished by Iranians and many others around the world who hope to be able to explore it in person one day. There are presently 26 registered UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Iran, more than in Japan, the United States and Greece on the roster of places catalogued by the United Nations’ cultural and educational agency. Among them are well-known...

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Remembering Siah Armajani, the late Iranian-American architect

Remembering Siah Armajani, the late Iranian-American architect

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: Many residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota, cross over the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge every day or move past it. It offers a unique vantage point to the well-liked Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, epitomised by the iconic $500,000 Spoonbridge and Cherry sculptural design. Most of the locals recognise Whitney, a Twin Cities philanthropist and civic leader who was married to the 1980 Independent-Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney and passed away in 1986. But to many Minnesota denizens and visitors of the Garden who happen to walk over the bridge spanning an interstate highway, or at least catch a glimpse of it from afar, the story behind the structure is almost undisclosed, unless one is...

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Cumberland Lodge: A Name I’ll Keep Remembering For Special Reasons…

Cumberland Lodge: A Name I’ll Keep Remembering For Special Reasons…

Photo by: Laura Garcia @lauragrb Kourosh Ziabari - The Huffington Post: Christmas heralds the beginning of the New Year for those who celebrate it. There are millions of people who observe Christmas, not necessarily because they follow Christianity. They sometimes mark this occasion because of their cultural and hereditary ties to the festival. But it’s an unfathomable fallacy to say that Christmas is only dear to Christians or people living and celebrating it in places, which are geographically considered to be part of the ‘West’. Even in Muslim-majority countries such as Iran, there are Christians who happily observe Christmas, and there are non-Christian Iranians who joyously join them in celebration. Shops put on...

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The Big Discovery: Finding a Mosque in the Middle of Nowhere

The Big Discovery: Finding a Mosque in the Middle of Nowhere

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: The last thing a tourist would anticipate to unearth in Cartagena de Indias in northern Colombia is a mosque in the middle of an unthinkably impoverished, underprivileged slum on the outskirts of the city close to the beach bordering the Caribbean Sea in La Boquilla. To understand the notion of being an absolute minority, one can compare the population of Colombia of about 49.8 million to the country’s Muslim citizens: minimally no more than 15,000! So, for a city like Cartagena with about 1.2 million residents, you might need a magnifying glass to detect the Muslims. Joaquin Sarmiento/FNPI The only mosque in Cartagena is situated somewhere that even many locals residing here for...

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The Colombian City of Vistas, Graffiti and Caribbean Culture

The Colombian City of Vistas, Graffiti and Caribbean Culture

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Colombia is captivatingly emblematic of Latin American traits that everyone associates with the region even without visiting it: a football fervor that paralyzes life and business nationwide whenever Los Cafeteros are playing; a liquefying Amazonian humidity; and a culture of public sanguinity that hardly ever fades away. The journey to get here is unrelenting. Long flights and numerous stopovers totaling some 27 hours finally took me to the city most commonly associated with the late Nobel Prize laureate in literature Gabriel García Márquez. As Colombia’s national icon, Gabo, as he is nicknamed, set some of his major novels, including Of Love and other Demons and Love in the Time of Cholera,...

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Angela Corrias: An Italian photojournalist who is impressed with Iran

Angela Corrias: An Italian photojournalist who is impressed with Iran

Kourosh Ziabari: As Iran’s tourism industry grows steadily, the corporate media’s stereotypical portrayal of Iran becomes unpopular and sometimes ridiculed by the Western citizens. With the influx of foreign tourists into Iran, especially from the European countries, more people are getting familiar with the unseen face of Iran as a country with an ancient culture, civilization and several natural and cultural magnets unknown to the world. An Italian journalist and photographer, who has traveled to Iran in the recent years three times, says the media’s clichés about Iran are obsolete and tiresome. Angela Corrias believes that Iranians are civilized and educated people and hospitality is a significant part of their culture and...

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Architecture and the way it constitutes our identity

Architecture and the way it constitutes our identity

  Kourosh Ziabari - Mark Foster Gage is the founding partner of Gage/Clemenceau Architects in New York City and a professor of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin. Gage/Clemenceau Architects was recently selected as one of the architecture firms to represent the United States in the 2010 Beijing International Biennale. Mr. Gage’s firm received an AIA New Practices citation in 2006 and was chosen as a finalist in the Museum of Modern Art/PS1 Young Architects Program in 2007. In 2008 he was selected as a winner of the...

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Interview with Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton

Interview with Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton

Kourosh Ziabari - Alain de Botton is a Swiss public intellectual, author, philosopher, television presenter and entrepreneur living in the United Kingdom. He has written several books on literature, philosophy, art, travel and architecture. In August 2008, he established a new educational enterprise in London called "The School of Life". Among his prominent books are "How Proust Can Change Your Life", "The Consolations of Philosophy" and "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". De Botton is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The title was awarded to him in recognition of his services to art and architecture. His books are translated into several languages and are among the best-selling works of literature in so...

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